IOCCC Winners Announced

Arachn1d writes "The IOCCC has finally announced the winners of the 2004 contest.
With winners this year including a mini-OS and a ray-tracer, the submissions should be interesting indeed - if you can make sense of them. According to the page, the actual code for the winners should be up mid-october."

Comments

Windows CE?

[wackysootroom]

Was the Mini-Os Windows CE by any chance? I'd bet that's pretty obfuscated!

Re:Umm

[TheShadowHawk]

Maybe that's the whole point. Everything (including the article) is well... obfuscated.

If the IOCCC is like the IOC

[Omega1045]

If the IOCCC is anything like the IOC, I am sure they will ask some of the winners to give back their prizes because of judging mistakes, and probably screwed over several Russian participants.

Re:Umm

[ophix]

wouldnt it need to be an UNobfuscated perl code contest? ;}

Time to turn in your geek card...

[GillBates0]

Every self respecting geek knows what the IOCCC is. By admitting that you don't, you've demonstrated your inability to cope with the rigorous demands of abiding by the high standards of geekiness.

Please hand in your Geek membership card on your way out. Thank you.

Re:Time to turn in your geek card...

[stratjakt]

Here's an example of what I'm talking about:

I got a resume from some kid just out of University. He attached some samples of the code he wrote. One of them was the perennial "calendar" app that I think we all were tasked to write.

Anyhow, I was perusing the code. It was pretty sloppy, one-letter variable names, multiple statements crammed together on single lines.

So I get to this one section of code. I can't even remember how it worked now, but it was this convoluded for() statement that flipped a flag and did some weird ass computation. It took me about 10 minutes of "stepping through" it in my head to figure out what it was doing.

It was calculating leap-years. I actually stared at it in shock, imagining how much time and energy this kid spent figuring out the worlds most assinine way to figure out if it's leapyear. I would have just wrote "if (year%4 == 0) { days_in_feb=29; }" or something of the sort. I wouldnt write "if (!(year%4)) {};" because perfoming boolean tests on integers is another pet peeve, it doesn't improve the code, just detracts slightly from its readability.

I actually interviewed the kid, and pointed the lines out to him. I asked him why he didn't just use the modulus operator. He just stared at me blankly. He had no clue what "modulus" meant.

As creative as his "solution" was, his code was bad, and he was a shitty programmer with a very very poor understanding of the language.

It's all cool to have this contest, and if that's how people want to spend their spare time, go ahead. I'm just trying to send a message to the newbies reading slashdot who are still in school and tend to think this is a hallmark of a good coder in the "real world". In the real world or business, anything that makes your day more of a hassle than it needs to be, is a bad thing.

Leave the obfuscation to the marketing department. We have one who actually listed double-ROT13 encryption as a "feature" of our product. Ok, he asked me what encryption we supported by default, and I told him double-ROT13 not realizing just how dense he was. The story gets better! The marketing shpiel he put together was going to the IT security folks at the NSA! One of them called me up, in tears from laughing. He asked if I could implement quad-ROT13. I told him I could implement 2^n-ROT13, iff n>0.

But that's another story for another article.

Transcript

[k4_pacific]

Here's an excerpt from the award ceremony:

winner: I won! I won!
MC: No, you're failing computer science.
winner: [Segmentation fault]

IOCCC? or IOC-C-C?

[TheShadowHawk]

Since the Olympics have just finished and still reasonably fresh on my mind, did anyone else read that as a stuttered IOC-C-C? (International Olympic C-C-Committee)

No? J-J-Just me then?

We get an award, too!

[justkarl]

And the Lifetime Acheivement in Server Destruction Award goes to...Slashdot!!! Congratulations!

Seriously, I can practically smell the server melting from here.

I think we just...

[kkovach]

obfuscated their webserver. :-)

- Kevin